More Sax Please, We're British

To celebrate my love of all things Jazz and to showcase the gimlet eye of this outstanding young photographer, I am posting this picture by rising star Sophie Borazanian. There is a link to her excellent blog, left.

Isn't this picture just a piece of class?

Beyond Black

I have just finished this acclaimed novel by Hilary Mantel. Its premise is an intriguing one, that a very gifted psychic cannot bring herself to share the terrible realities of the afterlife with her clients, so flimflams them in the usual manner whilst enduring the tortures of characters from her abused past who she referrs to as "the Fiends".

It is a dark and harrowing book, but the psychic, scars-of-childhood sections are pointlessly lightened by long sections of suburban satire which are tepid and aimed at easy targets (neighbourhood watch - new build estates).

It could do with being half the length and twice as creepy, but I finished it, which is something. Another Murakami next. Huzzah.

Amazing Characters

I found this on the Paris Review website. It is the first manuscript page of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. Isn't it amazing? It blows my mind that anyone can make literature in such alien characters.It is so far from my own comfort zone. There is so little I can really call my skills. This gave me a warm feeling inside.

To a Japanese blogger I will seem very naive and innocent but I find this a beautiful and uncanny object and want to celebrate it.

This Bird Has Flown

I have just finished reading probably the best known Japanese-language book of the last fifty years, Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. It is a coming-of-age tale of sorts, told in Murakami's trademark flat, almost naive style. I don't know what I love so much about Murakami. Any attempt to describe why I find his work compelling sounds lame - but I could name the likeably flawed, cultured and fragile central characters, the accumulation of quotidian detail about coffee, cigarettes and so many bowls of miso and noodles, the obsession with jazz and hip sixties pop or the blossomings of explicit sex dotted innocently throughout the narrative.


Close reading of the book shows that the lyrics of Lennon & McCartney's classic song resonate throughout the plot which tells of a young boy whose life is blighted by the early suicide of a best friend who then finds himself tied emotionally, erotically and metaphysically to the friend's ethereal and brittle lover Naoko. His attempts to live in the world of the living and not just exist in the world of the dead form the main drive of the narrative. The most refreshing and loveable character for me is Midori (Japanese for green), a sexually adventurous and fun-loving girl who has her own share of pain but stands in the book for the pert, fickle, unquenchable flame of life.